There are flowers in the mud.
Life after the flood.
Everything has changed and it will never go back the way it was.
Nearly everyone I know has a Gofundme. Nearly everyone I know doesn’t know what day it is. Nearly everyone I know is helping one another in every imaginable way, even in the face of their own immeasurable losses.
In one day, my thoughts had moved from sourcing vintage sweaters and coats to Tyvek suits, respirator masks, and rubber boots. I brought in 50 freshly sourced pieces to our vintage booth on Wednesday. Customers shopped and vendors stocked their booths in preparation for the Atomic 10 Year Anniversary Party that was set to happen the following week. By Friday the entire building was under 20 feet of water.
My car battery died, I go to Advance Auto Parts. The man replacing it tells us that half of his home in Swannanoa was washed away in a mudslide while he was still inside. He was watching TV, turned, and it was all gone. He says shortly after the fire department knocked on his door. There was a National Guard truck waiting outside to take him away before the water did. His elderly neighbors’ bodies were recovered at the stop light down the road. He used to mow their lawns.
We go a week with very limited contact to the outside world, we find out what is happening to our neighbors by listening to the radio - 99.9 Kiss Country. They are broadcasting 24/7. All cell service is down. Someone remarks that our cell phones have been reduced to very expensive flashlights. We are glued to our Radio Shack portable radio. People call in begging to be rescued. People call in asking for food and water, ice for their insulin, formula for their babies.
Often their prayers are answered within hours, neighbors are on standby ready to help at any cost. Queer anarchists work shoulder to shoulder with Republicans. The world seems so much smaller, and our differences do too. It was never more apparent that society would crumble without the working class.
I stand in line for free food outside a fine dining vegan restaurant called Plant. The employees dolling out the beans and veggies giggle and joke with one another. I feel fed by more than just the food.
On the day of the disaster, the skies darkened and the wind and rain came, beating Western North Carolina with enough water to sustain 619 days of Niagara Falls’ unrelenting force. In a matter of hours, the world I have called home for the last 11 years was swept down the Swannanoa and French Broad Rivers.
These ancient rivers, which flowed through this area before dinosaurs walked the earth, swelled nearly 30 feet in a matter of hours, devouring all that stood in their wake. Homes and highways were reduced to rubble, with some being so cleanly wiped from existence you would never have known anything stood in their spot.
What did remain when the floodwater receded is caked in inches of thick toxic mud. The sludge contained unknown chemicals, gasoline, fertilizer, and sewage - it’s smell fills our towns.
I stand in the ruins of what used to be our booth at the vintage store where we vend. The roof is falling in, the walls have been swept away. They spent hours the day before looking for a body they believed had washed into the back of the building, luckily they found no one.
One of our collapsed racks is sitting in a foot of mud. Our clothes, pieces we spent months sourcing, mending, and cleaning, still clinging to their hangers. We spend an hour trying to decipher what to do. We end up taking a heavy trash bag full of our most prized pieces, surely we could wash them, surely we didn’t lose everything.
But they are filled with toxins and poisons and the mold has already begun to set in. The plastic bag sits in our driveway for days until the first trash collection since the storm hauls our hope away.
While I stand in the biohazardous building that once housed so many of our hopes and dreams, I worry about getting content compelling enough to persuade people to donate to our Gofundme. I worry about the outside world forgetting about us. I worry about asking for help on Instagram. I worry about the people in the hollers, whose only way in and out has been reduced to impassable rubble and washed out bridges. I worry about when we will all have clean water coming from our pipes again, I think of Flint, Michigan - still fighting for drinkable water 10 years later. I worry about what my future, and the future of Western North Carolina will look like in the coming weeks. Normality feels like a lifetime away.
“Hey, how are you doing” is suddenly more than a formality. I look strangers in the eyes and feel our souls meeting. Within minutes of introducing yourself to someone, it’s not unusual to be hugging and crying. Most conversations revolve around the flood. “How did you fare? Did you lose your house? I’m so sorry. Here’s where to get clean water, food, or supplies. I’m glad you’re alive.”
Two weeks after the disaster we find ourselves in Marshall, NC on a private buy. Downtown Marshall is one of the hardest hit towns in the area, over a hundred years of history washed down the river. Its our first private buy since the flood, and the last place I would have expected it to be. We are on the outskirts of town picking in a large building that was previously used as a hay barn and is now being used as storage for the family.
As I’m sorting through racks I come across a 1980s sweatshirt for the French Broad Electric Membership Corporation - a co-op that was formed in 1939 to help provide electricity to rural areas of Madison County. The founding of the co-op was a direct reaction from the community after the Great Depression resulted in private electric companies neglecting rural areas. The linemen currently employed by the co-op had been working day and night to repair all 42,000 meters of line that was taken out by the storm - their entire system. They worked 18 hour days, all the while carrying the weight of their own losses from the storm.
Wednesday September 25th was the last day of the life I once knew.
I would not yet know the overwhelming grief, a grief so deep I felt it carving a hole in my stomach. Walking a mile down Swannanoa River Road and witnessing overturned semi trucks, helicopters wizzing overhead to rescue those stranded higher up on the mountain, antique warehouses mangled and turned to piles of debris, recovery teams with cadaver dogs searching for the dead, plastic bags and fabric waving as it hung from the branches of the few trees still standing on the riverside road, once peacefully lined with a lush array of vegetation.
I would not yet know the overwhelming radical love that radiates from our small mountain towns, expanding great distances that reach beyond our wildest dreams. The resilience, power, and strength that our community brings as offerings to one another, with all barriers broken down, we see one another for who we truly are - and we all need each other more than we could have ever known.
I can see the threads of grief weaving a web of hope. And somewhere there are still flowers.